2022-01-18 Besu Contributor Call

Agenda

Housekeeping
- Antitrust notice - https://www.linuxfoundation.org/antitrust-policy/
- This meeting is being recorded
- Please Mute unless speaking
- If you have a question use the raise hand feature

Discussion:

Besu Incentive Program

Goals
- Teams free to do what they want with validator value and validator tx fees (rewards)
- Keys will be divested over 6 month periods (allowing more and more funds to be withdrawn)

Provide long-term incentives to folks that are building Ethereum Mainnet clients
Offered to all mainnet client teams (execution and consensus)
EF will provide validator keys at a later time depending on incentive program milestones

Over 95% attestation and block proposal inclusions
Avoid slashing for these validators - slashed validators will be removed from the program
Consensus client issues - EF will not penalize execution layer client for consensus issues on the other client
Execution layer has to be quick enough (performant) to create the block

Interoperability
- Trust in this process by EF - good faith interop (could use canary nodes for combinations that are less tested)
Why Now?
- Prepping for the Merge
- Helps measure performance and confirms meeting protocol expectations
How do we run this program across the Besu community?
- This is a big ask for time from community members - Not all should be forced to be node operators
Concerns are:
- All maintainers can't run a release
- Data not shared from ConsenSys with the community
- Lack of transparency from ConsenSys team on roadmap
- Money will make this open source project more challenging with the community
- PRs that need to be reviewed in timely manner
Ideas for Incentivizing Besu community
- Near term idea: Bounty program
- Near term idea: Clear benchmarks/requirements for operator validator nodes
- Medium/long term idea: Besu DAO

Next Steps:

More detailed document around Incentive Program on Wiki
Agenda for next call (potentially off-cycle):
1. Incentive program (30 mins)
  1. Cost of running nodes
2. Besu maintainer progress/community concerns (30 mins)

If we have time...

General Announcements

Release updates
- Release process in general, plan for diversifying who can make a release.(Justin Florentine )
  - How many maintainers required to sign off on a release?
- GAR-E - what does it still need to reduce friction?
- What role (if any) does CircleCI have in releasing?
Work Updates
- Static code analysis (Justin Florentine)
  - Example output here: https://sonarcloud.io/dashboard?id=hyperledger-cicd_besu
  - How do we know when we should turn on build gating?
- Matrix/Rocketchat discussion
  - asking the community (Grace Hartley (Deactivated))
  - Fill the survey when is coming out
- Ongoing Vert.x upgrade Justin Florentine
- Discussion of the Ethereum Foundation announcement
Other Business
Open Forum
- Design process proposal for further modularization:
  - transaction pooling and block building is a hot topic lately. Justin Florentinewould like to start a design for factoring out block building much like we did with the EVM. What design artifacts should we produce (if any) prior to submitting PRs?
- Inactivity clause for moving maintainers to emeritus status - the current guide says a quarter of inactivity. Do we want to extend that? 6 months? Longer?
  > A general measure of inactivity will be no commits or code review comments for one reporting quarter, although this will not be strictly enforced if the maintainer expresses a reasonable intent to continue contributing.
Future Topics

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TBA

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